Showing papers on "Enlightenment published in 1971"

Utopia and reform in the Enlightenment

Abstract: In this detailed study of the republican tradition in the development of the Enlightenment, the central problem of utopia and reform is crystallized in a discussion of the right to punish. Describing the political situation in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the author shows how the old republics in Italy, Poland and Holland stagnated and were unable to survive in the age of absolutism. The Philosophes discussed the ideal of republicanism against this background. They were particularly influenced by the political and religious radicalism of John Toland, which had survived the English Restoration and was then reaching Europe. Professor Venturi traces the debate on the penal laws and the attempt to relate utopian ideas of society to the practical problem of dealing with man in society, which culminated in the assertion by many Philosophes that an unjust social system necessitated harsh penal laws, thereby rejecting the possibility of reform.

In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas

Abstract: The history of the Enlightenment has always been a lofty affair-a tendency that will not be regretted by anyone who has scaled its peaks with Cassirer, sucked in delicious lungfuls of pure reason, and surveyed the topography of eighteenth-century thought laid out neatly at his feet. But the time has come for a more down-to-earth look at the Enlightenment, because while intellectual historians have mapped out the view from the top, social historians have been burrowing deep into the substrata of eighteenth-century societies. And, as the distance between the two disciplines increases, the climates of opinion multiply and thicken and the Enlightenment occasionally disappears in clouds of vaporous generalizations. The need to locate it more precisely in a social context has produced some important new work in a genre that is coming to be called the "social history of ideas." Peter Gay, who has sponsored the term,' has attempted to satisfy the need with the second volume of The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York, 1969). A half year after the appearance of Gay's book, another secondvolume work came out in France: Livre et societ (Paris, 1970), the sequel to a pioneering collection of essays on sociointellectual history produced by a group at the VIP Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. These two volume 2's make fascinating reading together, because they show two different historiographical traditions converging on the same problem. Gay descends from Cassirer, the VIP Section group from the "Annales" school and from Daniel Mornet's experiments with quantitative history. Curiously, the two traditions seem to ignore each other. In a bibliography that totals 261 pages in both volumes, and that covers an enormous range of European history, Gay never mentions Livre et societ. He makes only a few, irreverent references to Mornet and does not seem to have assimilated much "Annales" history. The second volume of Livre et societe' (the first appeared a year before Gay's first volume) does not refer either to Gay or Cassirer. In fact, Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment was not translated into French until 1966 and has not made much impression on French study of the Enlightenment since its original publication in German in 1932, a year before the appearance of Mornet's Les origines intellectuelles de la Re'volution fran(aise and fourteen years before Paul Hazard's La pensee europeenne au 18' siecle. So here is an opportunity to compare the methods and results of two attempts, expressing two separate historiographical currents, to solve one of the knottiest problems in early modern history: the problem of situating the Enlightenment within the actualities of eighteenth-century society.

America as a Model for the Radical French Reformers of 1789

Abstract: HE American Revolution created a sentimental bond between the new American nation and French reformers who saw in American events a confirmation of their own ideas. With the philosophy of the Enlightenment they could lift the American Revolution out of its provincial context, and the American Revolution in turn invested their discursive thought with a reality it had not known before. Because the FrancoAmerican alliance protected the publication of American works from the customary ban on foreign political writings, French reformers were able to make the first real breach in government censorship. Several European periodicals catered to the demand for news of America, and translations of the American state constitutions circulated widely.' After the Declaration of Independence one French writer after another took up his pen to analyze the significance of the American Revolution, debating small points of American political forms as matters that impinged on his deepest commitments. "Not a book on America was printed between I775 and I790 but ended with a sort of homily," Bernard Fay observed.2 The obvious need for changes in the superannuated Bourbon monarchy had turned many prominent Frenchmen into reformers. Outwardly they were working for specific goals-penal reform, abolition of slavery, religious toleration, freedom of the press-but implicitly their activity suggested the need for the liberalization of French public life. Able men were eager to apply the knowledge of their enlightened age to the prob-

The Intellectual Origins of Mid-Victorian Stability

Abstract: In a well known passage Elie Halevy described Methodism as the key to the "extraordinary stability which English Society was destined to enjoy throughout a period of revolutions and crises."' Although Halevy's thesis has been subjected to cogent criticism, the general problem that he raised-the stabilizing effect of intellectual forces in the history of modern England-has not received the attention it deserves. This article will consider an aspect of that problem. It will argue that ideas and beliefs derived from the Enlightenment and the evangelical revival contributed significantly to the development in mid-

The Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism in German Thought

Abstract: A WELL-KNOWN FEATURE of the European Enlightenment was its "renascent" interest in classical antiquity. In Germany it was precisely the more sophisticated study of Greek and Roman culture which took place in the eighteenth century that resulted in the revolutionary changes in the Western view of history which continue to shape historical and political formulations on both sides of the Atlantic. The philosophical view of history which was thus produced two centuries ago is called historicism.' In German, the term, Historismus, of which "historicism" is a translation, was popularized after 1839 by romantic liberals like Rudolf von Haym, and accepted by conservative German historians to describe their basic assumption that individual events have to be seen in the context of a wider, universal historical development, and the facts of history explained in terms of fundamental concepts, such as that of the development of the modem state, or of freedom. As an attitude which dominated more than one discipline in nineteenthcentury Germany, it assumed that the true study of any discipline (linguistics, economics, literature) had to be historical in its orientation. By assuming "development," however, all thinkers who adopted a historical frame of reference for their work did not also necessarily assume progress. The Germans in particular assumed the validity of "eternal ideas" which, in some metaphysical or theological sense, manifest themselves in all ages. Though rooted in the German Enlightenment's revival of Platonic idealism, historicism was equally the product of the eighteenth century's juristic interest in the Roman law traditions of the Holy Roman Empire, and of Germany's Augustinian theological heritage. It also merged almost imperceptibly with the slowly developing nationalism

Religious Concepts and Moral Theory: Luther and Kant

Abstract: IT IS A COMMONPLACE TO SAY that for Kant the claims of morality are both independent of, and more fundamental than, those of religion. To be accepted as valid, religious claims must satisfy the distinctive criteria of morality; and the existence of God and the belief in immortality can only be legitimately established by reference to unquestioned moral premises. However, in his explanation of moral beliefs and actions Kant uses concepts which are, in effect, counterparts of religious concepts and he does so in ways which parallel the ways in which they are used by a certain type of religious thinker of whom Luther is the main, though not the sole, representative. Moreover, his use of these concepts is not only inappropriate to the understanding of the moral life but prevents him from giving an intelligible account of it. To make these claims is to leave open the question which factors might have influenced Kant in the formation of his mature moral theory. Several influences are readily identifiable: Plato and the Stoics, the Lutheran form of Christianity, especially Pietism, Rousseau, and, more vaguely, the general climate of opinion of the Enlightenment. For the claim that Kant in his ethical writings, beginning with the Grundlegung in 1785, persistently used essentially religious concepts to elucidate ordinary moral beliefs and attitudes is independent of any view as to the actual influences on him, whether they be religious or not.

The English Enlightenment

Abstract: Watts’s thought provides an insight into the peculiar nature of the English Enlightenment. It is fair to say that the European Enlightenment was the cultural expression of an age of absolutism. The German Aufklarung flourished under the enlightened despotism of Frederick the Great; the French Siecle des Lumieres grew out of, if in reaction to, the reign of Louis XIV. Such nationalist absolutism fostered the spirit of intellectual and spiritual absolutism, which was the hall-mark of the Enlightenment mind.

Introduction: Classicism and the Enlightenment

Abstract: The value of interpreting the work of More and Norris in relation to such problematic terms as Metaphysical, Classical and Romantic on the one hand, and Renaissance, Enlightenment and Modern on the other, depends largely on assigning some meaning to the middle term in each of these series of abstractions. Since the field of inquiry is principally that of religious lyricism, there can be little difficulty about choosing the work of Isaac Watts as the embodiment of both classical aesthetics and the English Enlightenment.

Philosophy: “Platonic Gibberish”

Abstract: Norris lived in an age when the Enlightenment was in the making. It is thus hardly fair to relate his thought to an external homogeneity, which when he wrote did not exist. The byways of his eclecticism need to be explored in order to show how he built up his philosophy bit by bit in reponse to the pressures of his age. These pressures include some miscellaneous and heterogeneous concepts, which eventually became part of the fabric of the Enlightenment, but they made themselves felt above all in the influence of Plato, Descartes and Locke. In his reaction to these influences, Norris adumbrates in many ways the philosophy of the Enlightenment, chiefly by filtering elements of Cambridge Platonism through to the 18th century, and eventually to Coleridge. In this he carries on the work of More, by registering, both ideologically and aesthetically, the waning of the Renaissance and the eventual rise of Romanticism. Norris’s ambivalence at the threshold of the Enlightenment means that he is particularly well-equipped to register this change. His isolation is not that of personal eccentricity. For two elements meet in him, as they met in the Cambridge Platonists, and Platonism and Cartesianism have in themselves an ambiguous relation to the Enlightenment. Under the influence of Plato and Descartes, Norris pursues philosophical byways which are both original and representative.

Philosophy: Descartes and Plato

Abstract: Henry More contributed a great deal to the formation of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. He worked hard to sift the old verities; but he spoke so often in the name of Plato, and so often in the name of Descartes, that his voice was blurred in the years when it most needed to be heard. The Enlightenment, through the Royal Society, grew out of Descartes, and through the latitudinarian spirit, out of Plato. Once this had happened, More’s attempts to submit his fourth ground of certainty to the criteria of experimental science led naturally to the absurdities of contradiction between Descartes and Plato, and to grotesque confusion between mind and matter.1 Such a gothic conclusion to the career of a founder of the modem mind can only be explained by looking carefully at the origins of More’s philosophy.2

Norris and the Enlightenment

Abstract: Since Norris’s reputation rests primarily on his Platonic idealism and Metaphysical poetry, it is necessary to establish to what extent he occupies a position on the threshold of the Enlightenment. If we take Browne’s “America and untravelled parts of truth,” and Glanvill’s “unknown Peru of Nature,” as an expressive indication of the spirit of the previous generation; 1 and if we take the age of Watts and Addison, with its self-conscious Enlightenment, as having passed the threshold; then it must appear that Norris is nearer to Watts than to Glanvill. The age of Browne and Glanvill was an age of exploratory enthusiasm and insatiable curiosity. These qualities faded as men realised they were rid of the cobwebs of the Schools and no longer haunted by the ghost of the Stagirite. When Watts rescued one last science — logic — from the disrepute it had lain in since Bacon had begun the great assault on Aristotle, his self-congratulatory dedication to “so polite and knowing an age” was already a cliche.2 Norris is also conscious of living in an enlightened age, but he appears to be less comfortable and less complacent about it. This sense of being in the Enlightenment, but not quite of it, can be pin-pointed at the beginning and at the end of his literary career.